How Does Spotify Work? Explained Briefly 2018

Spotify is a music streaming platform where you can find millions of songs, podcasts, and videos. Also, you will find music from different global artists over here. The Spotify comes with a free and paid subscription. For the free version, all you have to do is sign up on the website using your email or facebook account. Also, you can switch to the Spotify premium apk by paying some bucks.

However, there is a quite a lot of difference between the free and Spotify premium. The free version of the Spotify is kind of like an online music station and does not comes with quite a lot of features. Also, it is filled with ads. Where the Spotify premium allows you to access Spotify from different smartphone devices. Plus there is a desktop version also available for the app.

How Does Spotify Work?

So the question is How Does Spotify Work? Well, Spotify works quite differently when compared to other music streaming platforms. As the main goal of the platform is to deliver smooth music listening experience. Hence it has an impact on your Internet connection, as well as on your device’s storage.

In computer language the delay between requesting a track and hearing it know as Latency. And the Spotify wants this latency to lower down this as much as possible. So how Spotify does that? Well, to keep the latency low Spotify takes a few actions. The first action that Spotify takes is whenever you play a song on the platform it downloads a cache and saves it on your device.

So whenever you wish to listen to the same track, you do not have to download the cache again. Then Spotify starts to retrieve track from the servers. Also, it searches all the nearby computers that use Spotify and look for the caches. This way, Spotify lowers down the requests which are pointing towards the Spotify servers.

In other words, your device becomes a music player in a big network of other devices running Spotify. This way your device uses a P2P connection and exchanges data with each other. Also, the Spotify prefetches the data from the next track or album which you are listening to. The algorithm fetches the data a few seconds before the current song ends. This way you do not get to notice a lag between two tracks.

However, if you want to jump to some other song suddenly, then Spotify can also process the request very quickly.
Talking about the cache, whenever you play a song Spotify stores a cache file in your device’s storage. Hence when you play the same song again, it fetches data from the cache and offers you a fast result. Also when the cache is full, it overwrites the file.

Wrapping Up

Also, the cache files do not eat up much space. Or your internet data gets burned while the P2P communication happens. As the files are already pretty much compressed. So that was all for the question which says “How Does Spotify Work?”. If you happen to have any question do comment below.